


The Myth of Kentucky

by scioscribe



Category: Justified
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, Metafiction, Mythology - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 18:31:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1021991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harlan County is hardscrabble rock just pulled into the twentieth century by the skin of its teeth, never mind the twenty-first, it’s the tall trees in the holler, it’s the way the dirt smells on the hills, though, and that shit and those rocks and that bloodied soil grows legends; Harlan County, sometime in the seventies, grew Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder just to have one chase the other back and forth and breed myth whenever they clashed together at the gunshot or the hips.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Myth of Kentucky

**Author's Note:**

> I owe a considerable amount of self-esteem to norgbelulah and Thornfield Girl; they're the best.
> 
> "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend" is from _The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance_. Raylan and Boyd are from Kentucky.

Harlan’s got blood in its land, but fuck it, so does the rest of America. The boys grew up in a stolen country.

Harlan County is hardscrabble rock just pulled into the twentieth century by the skin of its teeth, never mind the twenty-first, it’s the tall trees in the holler, it’s the way the dirt smells on the hills, though, and that shit and those rocks and that bloodied soil grows legends; Harlan County, sometime in the seventies, grew Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder just to have one chase the other back and forth and breed myth whenever they clashed together at the gunshot or the hips.

Harlan puts them through their paces like horses worked to a sweat but Harlan never lets them forget their blood is licked up by that soil, too: there’s the mine and there’s the bullet. Every love story must have its constants.

*

Raylan Givens was Harlan’s intended, birthed out all long legs and Hollywood looks, why else the hell would someone like him be born somewhere like that? And there ain’t nothing Harlan likes better than it likes the clichés of the most epic Americana—everything smashed Horatio Alger dreams, small towns, racial tension, moonshine, and long lost love—so he grows up taking his whippings from his daddy and watching his momma take hers.

Now Arlo Givens is authentic Harlan, the kind of man who looks nothing like his son and could never have been with anyone beautiful enough to get him, either, a man half-lizard in his movements, and cold-hearted enough to love only the boy who isn’t his own. Arlo, like most Greek fathers, gets saddled with a son sure enough recognizably going to kill him one day, hates him for it, strikes first, like the snake he is.

Frances is Harlan’s better nature, always sweeping herself away like dust under a rug, until she’s gone for good, leaving her son to miss her without thinking of her, much.

Raylan Givens is born to his daddy’s violence and not his mother’s better nature.

Raylan Givens will always love blood.

*

Boyd Crowder is a mistake and all you need to do to know it is to look at his eyes. No one else in Harlan has eyes like that.

Listen to the way he talks. What the fuck is with that? He thinks it’s Elizabethan Kentucky and he struts across the stage of the Globe; he thinks in iambic pentameter with neat feet sometimes broken beautifully by an _ain’t_ or two. Harlan didn’t expect him, but Harlan falls in love listening to him, and so, surely, does Raylan Givens, down in the dark where none of them have any eyes, where all of them work this Tiresias story out against the coal-dusted walls and floor.

Boyd Crowder is beloved of his father and his brother. His mother, like Raylan’s, is dead. Softness in these boys comes only with each other.

Raylan’s Aunt Helen was a late addition. She’s not part of the original myth, as much as there is an original myth, besides Raylan and Boyd spinning through Kentucky, clothed in blood and burning like stars. The myth lacks in female parts. Winona and Ava have no maiden names. They wear their husbands’ so you know which of them goes with which.

Harlan is antiquated in that way, except for Mags Bennett. Mags Bennett smashes everything and her apple pie burns in the mouth and the gullet, sometimes comes up ashes in your throat. Mags Bennett is as Harlan as the dead.

What were we talking about? Boyd Crowder.

Boyd Crowder is a mistake, a spanner in the works of Harlan’s planning. Harlan accepts, though, and consumes, and all the stories you know, Boyd Crowder is a part of them, the trickster, shedding his skin, changing his spots, a different man in every year and at every angle. Postmodern take on it is that Boyd Crowder grows up knowing he’s a myth. What would that do to a boy, you suppose?

*

One telling has it that the boys never love each other.

All those meetings and all that blood played out in spools for no reason at all, except time and history and Harlan County, which must be glutted on death by the time they come along, all shameless arrogance and big innocent eyes.

Boyd Crowder saves Raylan Givens in the mine (there’s always the mine).

Raylan Givens, twenty years later, shoots Boyd Crowder through the heart (there’s always the bullet).

(Come to think of it, there’s always the heart.)

Boyd Crowder dies, the first time we know of the story being told, and people still say that the real one did do his last bit of breathing on his sister-in-law’s kitchen floor with fried chicken grease on his fingers, bourbon on his breath, and surprise wide-set in his face; some people say that the real Raylan Givens was a hard man who shot to kill. The story doesn’t take, not that way. That might have been what happened, but that ain’t how people remember it.

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

Who knows if those boys were ever real anyhow?

*

There’s an old woman with knotted tree branches for hands and arthritis medication that never does the trick. Her kids don’t call and her government’s forgotten her, but she knows Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder and on the long cold nights when the heater’s broke and the wind whistles against the sill and she shivers in her bed, she holds herself against them to keep warm. Oh, she says, they were lovely boys, lovely dangerous boys, did you hear they were down in the mine together? As close-knit as skin and bone until the war came and Boyd went into the desert, got burned red as a devil. Raylan exorcised him with the bullet, brought him back to God.

Boyd strung that heart-stained steel around his neck and wore it all his life. He never was any trouble after that.

*

No, this punk boy with a pierced lip says. The boy’s as queer as a three dollar bill, you can tell it by looking at him. He survives the holler through myth.

No, they was always trouble, both of them, time and time again. Raylan screws everybody moving and Boyd’s the only one that lives, gets himself mixed up in business that would kill anyone else. And them and Ava, they found an empire, they build on the motherfucking bones of this place, they make them a castle like to reach the sky.

All defiant-like.

And everybody lives happily ever after.

And Raylan kills his daddy.

*

The question of Arlo is an interesting question. What’s to be done about him? If you’re going to commit to loving Boyd Crowder, then Arlo has to take up his mantle and become the villain of the piece. You have to kill him, or change him, or forgive him.

Hardly anyone chooses forgiveness. Harlan grows bloody-mindedness like a weed.

In the stories where Boyd Crowder converts, he’s meant to be an exception to the rule, and even then he is the wrath and the thunder of onionskin pages and loud country preaching, and hardly ever any mention of Christ and blessed be the peacemakers. He is gentle as a lamb only when he has lost everything: blessed be the poor in spirit. He gets it right only before he recants it. The tragedy of Boyd Crowder is that he always has to change.

The tragedy of Raylan Givens is that he never can.

The best he can do is sometimes kill his daddy and sometimes not, sometimes love Boyd Crowder and sometimes not, sometimes Winona, sometimes Ava, sometimes crime, sometimes law, sometimes doomed, always bright-burning like a comet laid into skin. Raylan is the foundational figure. Raylan is the pivot on which the whole story turns. Ask someone what they think of Raylan Givens and you’ll know what they think of the whole wide world.

Everyone inscribes themselves on his skin.

Arlo? No one writes their name on Arlo. Not even Raylan gives a shit. He takes the Givens name and runs.

Raylan Givens is born leaving.

*

Boyd Crowder stays. Boyd Crowder waits.

Boyd Crowder is Penelope weaving while Raylan Givens sails as Odysseus over the whole of America. Boyd Crowder doesn’t repel suitors, though, he welcomes them: he gets into bed with white supremacy, with power, with prison, with blood on his hands. He is Penelope and he is the dog that recognizes Odysseus come home and barks. He is the bed carved into the tree, built for staying, built to fit Raylan Givens like a damn glove.

That he goes away to war, and away to prison, in some of the stories is meant as an excuse for the views he picks up like gum stuck to his shoes, like you have to go all the way to the desert or to Alderson to be racist in Harlan County.

Boyd Crowder traffics in hate, while he does it, because it’s what he wants to do, and because his conscience is in Miami, estranged from his soul by thousands of miles of land shook out smooth and flat like laundry. Boyd Crowder does wrong, it’s an essential part of him, but Boyd Crowder corrects himself, and that is always part of the story, too.

*

The girl with the straw-colored hair says she loves Ava Crowder because Ava Crowder is whatever she needs her to be. Ava shoots her husband in the chest at the supper table. She beckons Raylan in and in he comes. She is soft enough to be hurt when he turns to Winona, when divorce turns out to be a polygamist’s polite fiction. She carries a gun and she holds a lighter to a face soaked in whiskey. She wraps her fingers around the frying pan handle and she falls in love with Boyd Crowder and he makes her, no, fuck it, she makes herself into a queen. She doesn’t have a last name of her own because she doesn’t need one. Her family tree is pruned relentlessly down to just one branch but she’s Ava fucking Crowder and she is the dream of Kentucky womanhood, she is Mags’s jar of apple pie, she walks into Nobles Holler with her head held high, she goes to prison, she gets out. Family names and families are for people who can’t stand on their own.

Ava Crowder needs only herself. She loves Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder because she chooses to, not because she has to.

She doesn’t need anything but a shotgun, and failing that, a lighter and her wits.

Ava Crowder is myth in the process of its becoming and a hundred years from now, no one will remember that she came late to the story. People like the straw-haired girl will make sure of it. Love can midwife anyone into legend and Ava Crowder is fiercely, indomitably loved.

She twines between two lovers like hair between her fingers.

More than anything else, she survives.

*

Sometimes the way you hear it is that they all three grow up in Nobles Holler, and it’s the Panthers Boyd falls in with, not the neo-Nazis. Raylan’s success is harder won than usual. One of them belongs to Ellston Limehouse, a by-blow maybe, wrong side of the sheets. They’re a legend there, too.

Raylan shoots Boyd. Boyd never quite shoots him back. They stand together against the men who would kill them, and they give Ava a gun, too.

What matters is the resistance.

What matters is the persistence.

*

Oh, those boys, someone says. The real ones died in the mine. Story was they were lovers.

The brother of one of them married the town sweetheart, beat her black and blue, and she took a shotgun to him. That’s true enough.

She left Harlan for Miami. Never quite lost the habit of shooting people. She’s got names of dead boys tattooed on her wrists and her chest.

If you want to believe that.

*

Now, me, I met an old man once, target-shooting at a little range in Corbin. He wore a wedding ring on a string around his neck and he wore a cowboy hat, the kind you hear about. He was real handsome for his age. And every last one of those shots went right center mass. I don’t know who he was for sure, but he talked on the phone to someone who made him smile wide and bright. It was a smile with a lot of years behind it. If I’m going to talk about Raylan Givens, I’m going to talk about him, him and whoever else was on the other end of that line.

The way I heard it growing up, they was a story about how you couldn’t lose your roots. How Raylan always found Boyd, and Boyd always found Raylan, and Winona left, and Ava stayed. In the end, everybody always comes home.

That old man got in the car and drove somewhere.

And that license plate, tell you one thing: it sure as shit said Kentucky and no place else.

We know how to keep our stories.


End file.
